me the passage omitted has an historical value," I
will copy here verbatim what I advised my friend, both on his own
account and the President's, not to print nine years ago. Hawthorne and
his party had gone into the President's room, annexed, as he says, as
supernumeraries to a deputation from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with
a present of a splendid whip to the Chief Magistrate:--

"By and by there was a little stir on the staircase and in the
passage way, and in lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an
exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom (as being about the
homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable)
it was impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe.

"Unquestionably, Western man though he be, and Kentuckian by birth,
President Lincoln is the essential representative of all Yankees,
and the veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems
determined to regard as our characteristic qualities. It is the
strangest and yet the fittest thing in the jumble of human
vicissitudes, that he, out of so many millions, unlooked for,
unselected by any intelligible process that could be based upon his
genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose him, and unsuspected
of what endowments may adapt him for his tremendous responsibility,
should have found the way open for him to fling his lank personality
into the chair of state,--where, I presume, it was his first impulse
to throw his legs on the council-table, and tell the Cabinet
Ministers a story. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness,
nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had
been in the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him
a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the
aspect of the pattern American, though with a certain extravagance
which, possibly, I exaggerated still further by the delighted
eagerness with which I took it in. If put to guess his calling and
livelihood, I should have taken him for a country schoolmaster as
soon as anything else. He was dressed in a rusty black frock-coat
and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that the suit had
adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his figure, and had
grown to be an outer skin of the man. He had shabby slippers on his
feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray, stiff, som